The Beltline’s Emerald Necklace revisited

Twenty years ago, the Trust for Public Land imagined a future for the Beltline. It’s remarkable how much of that vision has become reality.

The land-conservation nonprofit hired preeminent urban planner and architect Alex Garvin in 2004 “to more clearly define the greenspace and developmental opportunities of the Beltline.”  But Gavin wasn’t one to look at a topic narrowly. He and his colleagues — working closely with local planners, advocates and officials — examined every facet of the Beltline idea, from trails and transit to public lands and commercial real estate. They produced a report that framed the massive ring as an expansion of Atlanta’s “public realm,” which would serve as a transportation corridor, an engine for community development and a string of connected parks.

That’s precisely what the Beltline is today, although the narrator in an accompanying video (see above) acknowledges it took a lot of hard work and savvy choices along the way.

“Excellence doesn’t just happen by itself,” she says. “You don’t just throw down the seeds and just walk away.”

The Beltline Emerald Necklace: Atlanta’s New Public Realm provided a template upon which the Atlanta Development Authority’s 25-year Beltline Redevelopment Plan a few months later was in large part based. Like the Emerald Necklace, the Redevelopment Plan envisioned using revenue from a new tax allocation district (TAD) to fund the purchase of rights of way and greenspace and the construction of trails and parks before taking up Beltline transit.  Gavin’s report also proposed an independent public entity, much like Atlanta Beltline Inc., to implement those plans. 

Now, TPL is taking a victory lap. Last week, at an event highlighted by the participation of former Mayor Shirley Franklin, the organization unveiled a report offering “lessons learned” over the last couple of decades.

“It is hard not to be impressed,” Emerald Necklace 2005-2025 declares. “ … The Beltline has reoriented a city bisected by highways to one oriented around a magnificent public realm. The importance of this point cannot be overstated.”

Nearly all right-of-way for the trail is now in public hands, and 18 out of the 23 miles are slated for completion before the World Cup games come to Atlanta in 2026.  Some 1,100 of the 1,400 acres identified by the original report for new parkland are now publicly owned or leased, with most of those 1,100 acres already serving as parks.

The trail has taken longer to build out than expected, and the TAD provided nowhere near enough revenue to fund either the infill stations or transit.  While TPL remains agnostic on Beltline transit, it notes in its new report that the ongoing debate over rail “reflects the changing nature of urban mobility, equity concerns, cost, and technological advances as well as the impact transit could have on the public realm.”

“There is little debate, however,” the report continues, “that the corridor is already functioning as a transportation corridor.”

Among “key take-aways,” the retrospective report urges the city to continue to connect Beltline parks into a series of “great parks” – and to extend that same idea to the emerging Chattahoochee Riverlands in Southwest Atlanta and the South River Forest toward in Southeast Atlanta; to leverage reservoirs and other water management properties into assets to complement greenspaces; to better integrate private developments with public greenspace; and “to leverage fallow properties – either publicly or privately held – as assets in a deliberate strategy to extend the benefits of the Beltline corridor.”

Above all, the retrospective keys in on a lesson with relevance for the entire city: “The new public realm promised for Atlanta in the Beltline Emerald Necklace is not limited to the corridor; rather it is a spatial language incubated in the Beltline that can inform all of Atlanta’s future development. In other words, the goal should be to turn the Emerald Necklace into an Emerald Brocade that spans the entire city.”

Or, as the video puts it: “Today , once again, we have one of those rare once in a generation opportunities to build upon something that’s already a proven success – to let this magnificent system of parks and trails running through our city grow to its full potential – the common ground, a literal trail weaving through and connecting Atlanta, the shared destination reflecting and embracing the diversity of Atlanta.”